#Epistemology of Social Media

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Social Media

The philosophy of social media examines the profound impact of social media platforms on human interaction, identity, and society. This interdisciplinary field intersects with ethics, epistemology, sociology, and media studies, exploring how digital technologies shape our communication, perceptions, and behaviors. By analyzing the philosophical implications of social media, we gain insights into the nature of digital life and its influence on contemporary society.

Key Themes in the Philosophy of Social Media

Digital Identity and Self-Presentation:

Social media allows users to construct and curate their online personas, raising questions about authenticity, self-expression, and the nature of identity.

Philosophers explore how the digital environment influences self-perception and the distinction between online and offline selves.

Epistemology and Information:

The spread of information and misinformation on social media platforms presents challenges to traditional epistemology.

Discussions focus on the credibility of sources, the role of algorithms in shaping information, and the impact of echo chambers on knowledge and belief formation.

Ethics of Communication and Behavior:

The ethical implications of online behavior, including issues of privacy, cyberbullying, and digital harassment, are central to this field.

Philosophers examine the moral responsibilities of individuals and platforms in fostering respectful and ethical online interactions.

Social Media and Society:

Social media's role in shaping public discourse, political engagement, and social movements is a significant area of inquiry.

The influence of social media on democracy, public opinion, and collective action is critically analyzed.

Privacy and Surveillance:

The balance between privacy and surveillance on social media platforms raises important ethical and philosophical questions.

The implications of data collection, user tracking, and digital surveillance on personal freedom and autonomy are explored.

The Nature of Virtual Communities:

Social media creates new forms of community and social interaction, prompting philosophical inquiries into the nature and value of virtual communities.

The concepts of digital solidarity, community building, and the social dynamics of online interactions are examined.

Aesthetics of Social Media:

The visual and aesthetic dimensions of social media, including the impact of images, videos, and memes, are considered.

Philosophers analyze how aesthetic choices and digital art forms influence perception and communication in the digital age.

Addiction and Mental Health:

The psychological effects of social media use, including addiction, anxiety, and the impact on mental health, are significant areas of study.

Philosophers explore the ethical considerations of designing platforms that may contribute to addictive behaviors.

Algorithmic Bias and Justice:

The role of algorithms in shaping social media experiences raises questions about bias, fairness, and justice.

Philosophers critically assess the implications of algorithmic decision-making and its impact on social equality and discrimination.

Commercialization and Consumerism:

The commercialization of social media platforms and the commodification of user data are key concerns.

Discussions focus on the ethical implications of targeted advertising, consumer manipulation, and the economic dynamics of social media companies.

The philosophy of social media provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the complexities of digital interaction and its impact on contemporary life. By examining issues of identity, epistemology, ethics, and societal influence, this field offers valuable insights into the ways social media shapes our world. It encourages a critical and reflective approach to digital life, emphasizing the need for ethical considerations and responsible use of technology.

[jensorensen]

Hostile Takeover

With the recent takeover of Twitter by a certain cretin who shall not be named here, the information landscape feels more dominated than ever by far-right conspiratorial garbage while progressives get pushed further to the margins. These guys are the true eliminationists, using money, power, and intimidation to shut down the entire project of civil rights and human rights. Yet in conventional narratives, it's still college kids or powerless people on social media who get scolded for being some sort of authoritarian threat.

If you are able, please consider keeping this work sustainable by subscribing to my weekly newsletter or Patreon.

[majokko120]

Nothing on Social Media is Real, Unless Proven Otherwise

In the sea of photographs, videos, drawings, digital works, accounts, personas, and AI content of things presented as fictional and things presented as real, all blend to present a crowd-sourced timeline of fiction.

All who enter these surreal waters blurry their existence, caught between reality and illusion. The contextual truth revealed only to those on land by those on land, requiring both to exit the water.

Exegesis

The postulate "Nothing on Social Media is Real, Unless Proven Otherwise" suggests a fundamental skepticism about social media experiences. This skepticism stems from the inherent difficulty to verify such experiences using our given ways of knowing.

In this digital sea, a mixture of real and fictional content, fiction and reality therefore become one. Reality IS fiction, and fiction IS reality.

The statement asserts that discernment requires both the observer (user) and the observed (users, content) to step out of the digital environment, as those "on land" do not discern and know what dwells in the "water" by mere virtue of having exited the water.

Addendum

The woman posting herself online in cosplay may be a real human being of flesh, bone, and spirit, with a real physical presence and identity, but from the experienced perspective of the User she may as well not be. In the water, her existence has been reduced to something perceivable, but unknowable.

[lesb0]

a lot of tumblrs indoctrinated into microcult groupthink factions like liberal vs left, trans vs terfs, hipster vs fandom, and other bs are all so desperate to be involved with epistemological bubbles because they otherwise have no access to knowledge or any actual social experiences, like if they ever stepped out of line with their cult frameworks they would be completely cut off immediately and have absolutely no one to speak to. with no friends, family, career, networks, or even any real social media tumblr IS their whole "life" so having original thoughts without adhering to the group consensus is something "life" threatening, etc

[transmutationisms]

genq what are the actual reasons that plagiarism is bad apart from profit and prestige?

so there are two main angles i usually think of here, which ultimately converge into some related issues in public discourse and knowledge production.

firstly, plagiarism should not just be understood as a violation one individual perpetuates against another; it has a larger role in processes of epistemological violence and suppression of certain people's arguments, ideas, and labour. consider the following three examples of plagiarism that is not at all counter to current structures of knowledge production, but rather undergirds them:

in colonial expeditions and encounters from roughly the 14th century onward, a repeated and common practice among european explorer-naturalists was to rely on indigenous people's knowledge of botany, geography, natural history, and so forth, but to then go on to publish this knowledge in their own native tongues (meaning most of the indigenous people they had learned from could not access, read, or respond to such publications), with little, vague, or no attribution to their correspondents, guides, hosts, &c. (many many examples; allison bigelow's 'mining language' discusses this in 16th and 17th century american mining, with a linguistic analysis foregrounded)

throughout the renaissance and early modern period, in contexts where european women were generally not welcome to seek university education, it was nonetheless common practice for men of science to rely on their wives, sisters, and other family members not just to keep house, but also to contribute to their scientific work as research assistants, translators, fund-raisers, &c. attribution practices varied but it is very commonly the case that when (if ever) historians revisit the biographies of famous men of science, they discover women around these men who were actively contributing to their intellectual work, to an extent previously unknown or downplayed (off the top of my head, marie-anne lavoisier; emma darwin; caroline herschel; rosalie lamarck; mileva marić-einstein...)

it is standard practice today for university professors to run labs where their research assistants are grad students and postdocs; to rely on grad students, undergrads, and postdocs to contribute to book projects and papers; and so forth. again, attribution varies, but generally speaking the credit for academic work goes to the faculty member at the head of the project, maybe with a few research assistants credited secondarily, and the rest of the lab / department / project uncredited or vaguely thanked in the acknowledgments.

in all of these cases, you can see how plagiarism is perpetuated by pre-existing inequities and structures of exploitation, and in turn helps perpetuate those structures by continuing to discursively erase the existence of people made socially marginal in the process of knowledge production. so, what's at stake here is more than just the specific individuals whose work has been presented as someone else's discovery (though of course this is unjust already!); it's also the structural factors that make academic and intellectual discourse an élite, exclusive activity that most people are barred from participating in. a critique of plagiarism therefore needs to move beyond the idea that a number of wronged individuals ought to be credited for their ideas (though again, they should be) and instead turn to the structures that create positions of epistemological authority under the aegis of capitalist entities: universities, legacy as well as new media outlets, and so forth. the issue here is the positions of prestige themselves, regardless of who holds them; they are, definitionally, not instruments of justice or open discourse.

secondly, there's the effect plagiarism has on public discourse and the dissemination of knowledge. this is an issue because plagiarism by definition obscures the circulation and origin of ideas, as well as a full understanding of the labour process that produces knowledge. you can see in the above examples how the attribution of other people's ideas as your own works to turn you into a mythologised sort of lone genius figure, whose role is now to spread your brilliance unidirectionally to the masses. as a result, the vast majority of people are now doubly shut out of any public discourse or debate, except as passive recipients of articles, posts, &c. you can't trace claims easily, you don't see the vast number of people who actually contribute to any given idea, and this all works to protect the class and professional interests of the select few who do manage to attain élite intellectual status, by reinforcing and widening the created gap between expert and layperson (a distinction that, again, tracks heavily along lines of race, gender, and so forth).

so you can see how these two issues really are part of one and the same structural problem, which is knowledge production as a tool of power, and one that both follows from and reinforces existing class hierarchies. in truth, knowledge is usually a collaborative affair (who among us has ever had a truly original idea...) and attributions should be a way of both acknowledging our debts to other people, and creating transparency in our efforts to stake claims and develop ideas. but, as long as there are benefits, both economic and social, to be gained from presenting yourself as an originator of knowledge, people will continue to be incentivised to do this. plagiarism is not an exception or an aberration; it's at best a very predictable outcome of the operating logics of this 'knowledge economy', and at worst—as in the examples above—a normal part of how expert knowledge is produced, and its value protected, in a system that is by design inequitable and exclusive.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Apr 18, 2024

“Why do you think the giraffe has a long neck?” says the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse to his son Edmund while he tucks him up into bed. “Does it have a long neck so that it can eat the leaves at the top of the tree? Or does it eat the leaves at the top of the tree because it has a long neck?”

“Does it matter?” says Edmund.

“A great deal, my son.”

This exchange is taken from Dennis Potter’s wonderful television play Where Adam Stood (1976), a loose adaptation of Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907). Gosse’s book must rank among the very best of autobiographies. It is his account of being raised by his father Philip, one of Darwin’s close contemporaries, a man whose faith in the Bible was so fervent that the revelations of natural selection almost destroyed him.

The question about the giraffes is Potter’s invention, but it adroitly captures the profound inner struggle of this scientist who had devoted his life to a belief-system that was suddenly falling apart. It wasn’t just a matter of changing his mind as new evidence emerged, because the proposition that the earth’s age could be numbered in the billions rather than the thousands was not something that his faith could accommodate. The stumbling block was the Bible, a point that Edmund is quick to acknowledge in his book:

“My Father’s attitude towards the theory of natural selection was critical in his career, and oddly enough, it exercised an immense influence on my own experience as a child. Let it be admitted at once, mournful as the admission is, that every instinct in his intelligence went out at first to greet the new light. It had hardly done so, when a recollection of the opening chapter of Genesis checked it at the outset. He consulted with Carpenter, a great investigator, but one who was fully as incapable as himself of remodelling his ideas with regard to the old, accepted hypotheses. They both determined, on various grounds, to have nothing to do with the terrible theory, but to hold steadily to the law of the fixity of species.”

Philip Gosse had an instinct for scientific enquiry, but the new discoveries simply could not be reconciled with his holy text. His whole being was invested in the Biblical truth, and to cast that in doubt would be to undermine the crux of his being. To admit that he might have been wrong, in this particular instance, would be a form of spiritual death.

Both Gosse’s memoir and Potter’s dramatisation grapple with what Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (in their book How to Have Impossible Conversations) call an “identity quake”, the “emotional reaction that follows from having one’s core values disrupted”. Their point is that when arguing with those who see the world in an entirely different way, we must be sensitive to the ways in which certain ideas constitute an aspect of our sense of self. In such circumstances, to dispense with a cherished viewpoint can be as traumatic as losing a limb.

The concept of identity quakes helps us to understand the extreme political tribalism of our times. It isn’t simply that the left disagrees with the right, but that to be “left-wing” has become integral to self-conceptualisation. How often have we seen “#FBPE” or “anti-Tory” in social media bios? These aren’t simply political affiliations; they are defining aspects of these people’s lives. This is also why so many online disputes seem to be untethered from reason; many are following a set of rules established by their “side”, not thinking for themselves. When it comes to fealty to the cause, truth becomes irrelevant. We are no longer dealing with disputants in an argument, but individuals who occupy entirely different epistemological frameworks.

Since the publication of the Cass Review, we have seen countless examples of this kind of phenomena. Even faced with the evidence that “gender-affirming” care is unsafe for children, those whose identity has been cultivated in the gender wars will find it almost impossible to accept the truth. Trans rights activists have insisted that “gender identity” is a reality, and their “allies” have been the most strident of all on this point. As an essentially supernatural belief, it should come as no surprise that it has been insisted on with such vigour, and that those who have attempted to challenge this view have been bullied and demonised as heretics.

Consider the reaction from Novara Media, a left-wing independent media company, which once published some tips on how to deceive a doctor into prescribing cross-sex hormones. Novara has claimed that “within hours of publication” the Cass Review had been “torn to shreds”. Like all ideologues, they are invested in a creed, and it just so happens that the conviction that “gender identity” is innate and fixed (and simultaneously infinitely fluid) has become a firm dogma of the identity-obsessed intersectional cult.

Identity quakes will be all the more seismic within a movement whose members have elevated “identity” itself to hallowed status. When tax expert Maya Forstater sued her former employers for discrimination due to her gender-critical beliefs in 2019, one of the company’s representatives, Luke Easley, made a revealing declaration during the hearing. “Identity is reality,” he said, “without identity there’s just a corpse”.

This sentiment encapsulates the kind of magical thinking that lies at the core of the creed. So while it becomes increasingly obvious that gender identity ideology is a reactionary force that represents a direct threat to the rights of women and gay people, there will be many who simply will not be able to admit it. In Easley’s terms, if their entire identity is based on a lie, only “a corpse” remains. From this perspective, to abandon one’s worldview is tantamount to suicide.

This determination to hold fast to one’s views, even when the evidence mounts up against them, is known as “belief perseverance”. It is a natural form of psychological self-defence. After all, there is a lot at stake for those who have supported and enabled the Tavistock Clinic and groups like Mermaids and Stonewall. Many of the cheerleaders have encouraged the transitioning of children, sometimes their own. What we have known for years has now been confirmed: many of these young people will have been autistic, or will have simply grown up to be gay. For people to admit that they supported the sterilisation of some of the most vulnerable in society would be to face a terrible reality.

This idea was summarised in parliament on Monday by Victoria Atkins, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. Addressing Labour MP Wes Streeting, she said:

“I welcome all those who have changed their minds about this critical issue. In order to move forward and get on with the vital work that Dr Cass recommends, we need more people to face up to the truth, no matter how uncomfortable that makes them feel. I hope the honourable gentleman has the humility to understand that the ideology that he and his colleagues espoused was part of the problem. He talked about the culture and the toxicity of the debate. Does he understand the hurt that he caused to people when he told them to ‘just get over it’? Does he know that when he and his friends on the left spent the last decade crying ‘culture wars’ when legitimate concerns were raised created an atmosphere of intimidation, with the impact on the workforce that he rightly described?”

It remains to be seen whether those politicians who failed to grapple with the implications of gender identity ideology, and who mindlessly accepted the misleading rhetoric of Stonewall and its allies, will have the humility to admit that they were wrong. Many culpable celebrities have been choosing to remain silent in recent days, while others have opted for outright denial. On the question of puberty blockers and their harm to children, television presenter Kirstie Allsop has made the remarkable claim that “it is, and always has been possible to debate these things and those saying there was no debate are wrong”. The concept of “no debate” was official Stonewall policy for many years, and has been a mantra for many within the trans activist movement. To suggest that there have been no attempts to stifle discussion on this subject can only be ignorance, mendacity or a remarkably acute form of amnesia.

Of course, the stakes could hardly be higher. We are dealing with complacency and ideological capture that had resulted in the sterilisation and castration of healthy young people. It is, without a doubt, one of the biggest medical scandals of our time. It is entirely understandable that those who have supported such terrible actions would enter a state of denial. And so we must also be sensitive to those who are now strong enough to admit that they were mistaken.

But we also need to prepare ourselves for the inevitable doubling down. There are those whose psyche cannot withstand the kind of identity quake that Philip Henry Gosse once suffered. His solution was to write a book explaining why God had left evidence of natural selection. It was called Omphalos (1857) – the Greek word for “navel” – and his thesis was that since Adam had no mother, his navel was merely an addition to generate the illusion of past that did not exist. The fossils that were being discovered in the ground were therefore no different than the rings in the first trees in the Garden of Eden. They weren’t evidence of age, but rather part of God’s poetical vision.

Some of the revisionism and excuses from gender ideologues are likely to be even more elaborate. They have invested too much in their fantasies to give up without a fight.

==

As gender identity ideology falls apart, we need to pay attention to who is working to fix the mistakes they made, who is doubling down, and who is remaining silent.

[tanadrin]

https://www.tumblr.com/tanadrin/754562150575505408/i-get-your-point-about-scorn-rage-and?source=share

It's not an emotive expression of anxiety, it's recognition that if you approach American politics with cynicism, you usually end up right. The cynics said Chevron was gonna get overturned, it got overturned. The cynics said the debate would hurt more than it helped, it did. We're in a tailspin, and nothing is stopping it.

The best thing I can do on election day is cast my ballot, show up in a bar, get blackout drunk, watch Trump get elected, and then throw myself off a fucking bridge.

Man, this is why I hate getting into these arguments. This is not a debate about the epistemological merits of pessimism. This is somebody using my ask box to vent their suicidal ideation, in the hope I can somehow fix it; and if I can’t find just the right words to say, they at least get the feeble dopamine hit of feeling right, even if they also are miserable.

Look. This is not a conversation about rational forecasting of the future. You said “we will all be dead in five years.” I said, “wow, that’s a crazy thing to say.” You said, “what I mean is I will kill myself if Trump wins.” The only causal through line here is despair. And, like, politics is important and reflects real stakes and real lives—but it is not the only important thing in the world.

You strike me as the sort of person who doomscrolls Twitter a lot, who is deeply invested in politics but doesn’t have much personal or emotional fulfillment in other areas of your life, and who is swayed by people who portray pessimism as smart and cool and optimism as naive and pathetic.

(Folks, you absolutely have to make meaning in your life outside of social media. Sorry, but it’s true. You need hobbies. You need to socialize in person. You need to go out sometimes, and work up a sweat sometimes, and stare at vistas that are not the four walls of your room and your internet browser.)

You, anon, probably need a therapist and/or a good SSRI combo, since being very depressed may make it difficult to start to do other things that will improve your mood and bring other sources of meaning to your life. But I recommend trying anyway.

I will delete further asks on this theme. Getting into one of those looping conversations where a depressed person tries to convince you their depressive spiral is an objectively correct reaction to the world around them, while you try to comfort them and suggest getting treatment for depression obliquely enough that they heed your advice is tough enough when it’s someone close to you; but it’s also a waste of my time and yours.

You have a mood disorder that affects your cognition. You cannot perceive it, because, well, you have a mood disorder that affects your cognition. It is treatable, but it will require time. I recommend spending much less time on social media while you pursue treatment, since social media can greatly exacerbate certain mood disorders.

[mourninglamby]

what were ur fav dsmp arcs and characters im wondering 👀

this is a question ive always had a weird reaction to lol. but for the sake of ease ill say exile arc and pogtopia.

i like stories about darker topics that usually pertain to my trauma or that have something to say philosophically. that Tell me something New. ethel cain's preachers daughter and revolutionary girl utena would be some examples of the type of media i moved onto after dsmp.

this is why i would get so angry when theyd prove to the audience that they werent trying to Say anything. but at the same time its complicated and i think the story was told by the actors epistemologically. they had their limits when it came to being conscience of their rhetoric. And I'm not calling them stupid; theyre just normal people who dont think about social commentary a lot.

this story is rly uncomfortable to examine under a microscope or in a bubble, especially considering the allegations against that lying narcissistic sack of pus dream that are still being debated right now. but i think that's what makes me like these arcs even more. maybe like is the wrong word... i am fascinated.

despite what ex fans or dream stans might propagate, exile arc was about abuse. so was the ravine to some extent. it also included characters struggling with ptsd, and very odd yet scarily realistic protrayals of suicidal ideation (sometimes sans trigger warnings until midway through streams or NONE AT ALL ON MAIN CHANNEL VODS). these were handled in a way i doubt any media will ever replicate, and it's not for it's quality of writing, but for how interwoven the people are to their characters. parasocialism probably plays into this quite a bit, but i digress.

i feel like these arcs (let alone the overarching narrative) escape traditional categorization. the only genre i could ascribe it to is theatrical realism for its dialogue and subject matter. but thats wrong too because the events in the story are supposed to be literal, like the three life system and communicators, while simultaneously in Real Life being more.. metaphorical? its hard to explain. it really is a puzzle.

im not very smart, im an art school dropout with years of unresolved issues im still struggling with. but i feel very strongly about this subject. id love to hear what other ppl think about their "favorite" arcs.

Edit : I meant to touch on characters too but I sorta combined that with my discussion of the arcs. So yeah Tommy and wilbur are my fav characters. Short answer.

[schraubd]

Did You Hear? CUNY Branches Cancel Hillel Yom Ha'atzmaut Events

Two branches of the City University of New York system -- Kingsborough and Baruch -- have apparently canceled Israeli Independence Day events sponsored by local Hillel chapters, citing security risks. In the case of Baruch, administrators reportedly offered alternative venues to the Hillel chapter (which were declined), at Kingsborough, by contrast, the administration reportedly refused to make any arrangements to enable the event to go forward. CUNY is a public university, so this raises the usual First Amendment problems. While every case is different, there are some clear overlaps between this case (in particular, the citation to "security" concerns) and the cancellation of pro-Palestinian speakers and events justified on similar logic (for example, at USC). This, of course, represents a golden opportunity for people to lob dueling hypocrisy charges at one another ("You were aghast when this happened at USC, but I don't hear you complaining now!" "Yeah, well you were apologizing for this when it happened at USC, but you're aghast now!"). I'm sure that will be a grand old time for everyone. I do want to make one note on the relative coverage and penetration of this story compared to other free speech debacles related to Israel and Palestine on campus. I haven't seen this story covered outside of the Jewish press. That doesn't mean it won't be later, and I'm not generally a fan of the "...but you'll never see this reported in the mainstream media!" genre of commentary. In part, that's because I think there's massive selection bias in what we claim is over- or under-covered; in part, it's because I think virtually everyone massively overestimates how many stories break through to mass public consciousness at all. In reality, I think different stories gain traction in different media domains, such that a story which might tear through one sort of social or ideological circle might make barely a ripple in another. That said, in many of the circles I reside in, there is essentially no knowledge that there are any cases of academic censorship of "pro-Israel" voices on campus at all. To be clear, I'm not saying that there are not numerous cases of academic freedom violations targeting pro-Palestinian speakers -- there are a slew of them. But the notion that this is a Palestine exception to academic freedom, rather than something which unfortunately happens in a host of other cases and contexts (including, in the right-slash-wrong environments, to pro-Israel speakers), speaks less to the reality of academic freedom and more to an epistemology of which cases get attention and which don't. There are many academics for whom the Steven Salaitas are known, while the Melissa Landas are not. In other domains and registers, there are different gaps. Ultimately, it's a variant on "they would say it about Jews, they'd say it about other groups too." The claims of injustice are not wrong, but the claims of uniqueness very often are. How many times have we heard variations on "can you imagine if there was a mob of people harassing and making racist remarks towards any other minority group -- how would universities respond to that?" (As we saw at UCLA, the answer apparently is "they'd sit back and let said mob kick the crap out of their targets"). And at the same time, we've also heard plenty of iterations of "if a university dared cancel a pro-Israel event, it'd be on the front-page of every newspaper for the next month" (so far, no headlines). So I'll all say is that, if you're of the bent that there's no meaningful suppression of pro-Israel speech in campus environments, and your informational ecosystem (other than me, I guess) didn't alert you to this cancellation at CUNY, you should consider how the former belief might be correlated with the latter lacuna. Other people might have different gaps, and they should contemplate what generates them as well. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/SaROhQI

[luxe-pauvre]

MIT professor Judith Donath has observed that even when people appear to be talking about other things, they're often talking about themselves. Suppose I log on to Facebook and share a false - even absurd- story about how airplane contrails are endocrine-disrupting chemicals being sprayed as part of a liberal plot to lower the testosterone levels of America's youth. I may not be as interested in having you believe my claims about contrails as I am in signalling my own political affiliations. Sharing an article like this signals that I belong to a group of people who believe in conspiracy theories and distrust the "liberal agenda" in America. And if that's my aim, it doesn't matter to me whether the story is true or false. I may not have read it, I may not care if you read it, but I want you to know that I am a fellow tinfoil hatter. The signal itself becomes the point. […] Professor Donath's insight springs from a broader tradition in the field known as communication theory. We often think of communication solely as the transmission of information from sender to receiver. But this ignores a second, broader social aspect of communication, one that is revealed by its origins in the Latin verb communicate, "to make shared or common.” Communication is how we establish, reinforce, and celebrate a shared framework for thinking about the world. Think about a religious mass, or even the scripted, ordered regularity of the nightly news. Communication over social media does the same thing: It creates and structures social communities. When we send out a tweet or Facebook post or Instagram image, we are affirming our commitment to the values and beliefs of our particular online community. As the community responds, these common values are reaffirmed through likes, shares, comments, or retweets. Blindfolded and submerged in a pool, I shout "Marco!" If I do so correctly, my network of acquaintances sends back an encouraging chorus. "Polo! Polo! Polo!" Participating on social media is only secondarily about sharing new information; it is primarily about maintaining and reinforcing common bonds. The danger is that, in the process, what was once a nationwide conversation fragments beyond repair, People begin to embrace tribal epistemologies in which the truth itself has less to do with facts and empirical observation than with who is speaking and the degree to which their message aligns with their community's worldview.

Carl T. Bergstrom & Jevin D. West, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World

[vital-information]

"Much work in queer and transgender studies is governed by an epistemological framework that, as Robyn Wiegman has argued, “calls for scholars in identity studies to offer cogent and full accounts of identity’s inherent multiplicity in ways that can exact specificity about human experience without reproducing exclusion”. This version of an intersectional critical project faces an injunction to continually bifurcate the categories of identity it takes as its objects, driving toward a horizon beyond which the spider web of subaltern identity will be fully articulated and social justice (or at least its discursive possibility) will be achieved. The attempt to glimpse the other side of this horizon can lead to the fetishization of certain kinds of bodies—the contours of which change over time—as representing an Archimedean endpoint of radical otherness. Within queer theory and politics, rapid changes in the social location of gays and lesbians have forced these contours to shift quite rapidly. As a homonormative political vision has made its way to the center of liberal politics and concomitant rights have been granted to some—generally white, moneyed, and sexually respectable—gay and lesbian subjects, the L, G, and (more ambiguously) B in the bricolage of queer identity no longer appear to pose, in and of themselves, an existential challenge to social and political norms. A queer political discourse that remains beholden to the logic of identity has thus passed the buck along to the T, asking transgender subjects to hold down the fort of queer difference. The transgender subject—and particularly the figure of the trans woman of color—has come to figure within these coordinates as “a utensil to reference at will” when figuring the outer limits of political representability (Vidal-Ortiz). As Kate Millett once wrote of Jean Genet, trans women of color are seen within this discourse as having “achieved the lowest status in the world,” and through that “perfection of opprobrium” have “acquire[d] the pride of the utterly abject, a condition which turns out to be next door to saintliness”.

All of this has led to what we might call a politics of trans sincerity, in which the gender-nonconforming subject is celebrated as transgres-sive to the extent that her nonconformity can be read as serious —that is, to the extent that she rejects camp...

This new vision of transgender evokes David Halperin’s account of a contemporary homonormative sociality in which sex and desire have switched places with culture and sensibility as tokens of admission into gay male life. Whereas once, Halperin quips, gay men hid their porn collections in the closet and framed their Broadway playbills, now they hide their play-bills in the closet and frame their porn (). Yet this state of affairs—which, in the case of both transgender (particularly trans feminine) and gay male aesthetics, pivots on the status of camp—exists in tension with one that has been more often remarked upon: the self-conscious absorption of camp aesthetics into a wide swath of mainstream media productions, from Lady Gaga to RuPaul’s Drag Race, which in turn bear a complex and varied relationship to queer audiences. In Halperin’s account, such productions testify to the survival of gay culture, however disavowed, after several generations of denial that it still exists or still matters.

I would amend this argument to claim that, though camp performance is in fact ubiquitous, camp reading practices—techniques for interpreting a performance, cross-gendered or otherwise, as camp—have been pushed back into the closet. “What Camp taste responds to is ‘instant character,’ ” Sontag writes, “understood as a state of continual incandescence—a person being one, very intense thing”. You may not be the gender you were assigned at birth, but according to the ontology of camp, you are really something. (And most likely you are—as my grandmother would say, with the emphasis on both words—really something.) Camp taste’s response to such incandescence may take on a range of affective and epistemological guises. It can appear as an intimate act of aggression, as in the drag spectator’s “read,” her knowing look at a performance that shows its seams (Butler, Bodies). But it can manifest, too, as what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls camp-recognition, in which the encounter with a tacky or overwrought object elicits a gesture of sympathetic identification from the viewer who, instead of distancing herself from the scene of aesthetic disaster, asks, “What if whoever made this was gay, too?". Either way, camp reading—forsaken or forgotten within much queer political discourse today—marks an attempt to grasp its object as a whole."

Marissa Brostoff, "Notes on Caitlyn, or Genre Trouble"

[omegaphilosophia]

The Impact of Film and Video on Society

Film and video have profoundly impacted society in various ways, shaping culture, politics, social behavior, and individual identity. Here are some key effects:

1. Cultural Influence:

Storytelling and Shared Narratives: Films and videos serve as powerful storytelling tools that create shared cultural narratives. They convey societal values, norms, and ideals, influencing how people perceive the world and their place within it.

Globalization of Culture: The global distribution of films and videos has facilitated the spread of cultural ideas across borders, promoting cultural exchange but also raising concerns about cultural homogenization and the dominance of certain cultures over others.

2. Social and Political Impact:

Awareness and Advocacy: Films and documentaries have been instrumental in raising awareness about social and political issues, from civil rights movements to environmentalism. They can mobilize public opinion and inspire activism.

Propaganda and Persuasion: Throughout history, films have also been used as tools of propaganda, shaping public opinion and reinforcing political ideologies, particularly during times of war or political unrest.

3. Behavior and Social Norms:

Shaping Social Norms: Film and video often depict societal norms, behaviors, and expectations, influencing how individuals perceive gender roles, relationships, and other social constructs. This can reinforce stereotypes or challenge them, depending on the content.

Consumer Behavior: Advertising through video content has a significant impact on consumer behavior, influencing buying decisions and popularizing trends.

4. Identity and Representation:

Representation of Diversity: Film and video provide platforms for representing diverse identities, including different races, genders, sexual orientations, and cultures. Positive representation can foster inclusivity and self-acceptance, while negative or stereotypical portrayals can perpetuate prejudice.

Identity Formation: Individuals often see themselves reflected in film and video, influencing their identity formation and how they relate to others in society. This is particularly impactful for marginalized communities seeking representation.

5. Education and Information:

Educational Content: Films and videos are widely used as educational tools, providing accessible and engaging ways to learn about history, science, and other subjects. Visual storytelling can enhance understanding and retention of information.

Misinformation: On the downside, the spread of video content also facilitates the dissemination of misinformation, especially in the digital age, where videos can go viral without verification.

6. Technological and Artistic Innovation:

Artistic Expression: Film and video have expanded the possibilities for artistic expression, combining visual, auditory, and narrative elements to create new forms of art. This has led to the development of various film genres, styles, and techniques.

Technological Advancements: The evolution of film and video technology has driven innovation in both the arts and other fields, from CGI in movies to virtual reality experiences that blur the line between fiction and reality.

7. Social Connectivity and Communication:

Social Media and Video Content: The rise of platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram has democratized video production, allowing individuals to create and share content widely. This has revolutionized how people communicate, share information, and build communities online.

Impact on Attention Span: The proliferation of short-form video content, particularly on social media, has raised concerns about its impact on attention spans and the quality of discourse.

8. Economic Impact:

Entertainment Industry: The film and video industry is a significant economic driver, creating jobs and generating revenue globally. It also influences tourism, fashion, and other industries.

Piracy and Intellectual Property: The digital distribution of films and videos has also led to challenges with piracy, affecting the economic model of the entertainment industry.

9. Psychological and Emotional Impact:

Emotional Engagement: Films and videos have the power to evoke strong emotional responses, from joy and laughter to fear and sadness. This emotional engagement can have therapeutic effects or, conversely, contribute to emotional desensitization.

Escapism and Coping Mechanism: For many, watching films or videos serves as a form of escapism, providing a temporary reprieve from the stresses of everyday life and offering a means of coping with personal challenges.

10. Ethical and Moral Reflection:

Moral Dilemmas: Films often explore complex moral dilemmas, prompting viewers to reflect on their values and beliefs. This can lead to greater empathy and ethical consideration in real-life situations.

Impact on Violence and Behavior: The portrayal of violence in films and videos has sparked debates about its potential influence on behavior, particularly among young audiences, leading to discussions about censorship and responsible media consumption.

Film and video have transformed society by shaping culture, influencing behavior, driving technological innovation, and providing new ways to communicate and express ideas. While they offer significant benefits in education, entertainment, and social awareness, they also pose challenges related to representation, misinformation, and ethical considerations. As these mediums continue to evolve, their impact on society will likely grow, further intertwining with our daily lives and collective consciousness.

[baravaggio]

Hi, I saw your tags on that post about queer labels and was wondering if you could expand on what you meant about the limitations of our language of sexuality and the stuff about grounding conversations about this stuff in history and epistemology?

Asking in good faith, I just never thought about it in those terms, so I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Sure! Just to be clear, I was kind of going off on a tangent in the tags, all that stuff wasn't entirely relevant to the poll at hand, lol - when I'm introducing myself to others or talking to people casually I don't expect to be having these kind of conversations.

Broadly speaking, when I talk about the limitations of our language of sexuality, what I'm referring to is the way we might find that our lived experiences aren't adequately captured by our historically and culturally-determined vocabularies around sexuality, and sexual identity in particular. When I talk about grounding our conversations about this stuff in history, I'm saying that I think it's more useful to pay attention to the historical and cultural reasons behind why this is the case as opposed to doing things to intellectually and linguistically skirt around the issue.

There's a few reasons why I think this is worth caring about:

It allows us to clearly state that sexual identity as a concept has its origins in medicine and psychiatry, and continue to examine how our modern concepts of terms like "gay" and "lesbian" have been historically (and to an extent, continue to be) mediated by medicine. If we care about liberating ourselves from a medicalized understanding of gender and sexuality, we need to be attentive to the ways in which the pathologization of homosexuality has shaped not just our oppression, but things like our politics and language.

It allows us to be attentive to the ways in which certain sexual identities, e.g. "bisexual", have not followed the same trajectory. It prompts us to ask the following: what are the theoretical reasons behind why this is the case? What does this mean for the history of bisexual identity formation, and the ways we attempt to define & legitimize ourselves today? How does this impact on bisexuality's degree of cultural intelligibility? How does this affect the language and politics of bisexuality?

It clearly positions issues of language and history as relevant to all queer people, regardless of particular orientation. In an ideal world, we're able to talk about the specifics of, and similarities & differences around how this impacts our lived experiences as gay people/lesbians/bisexuals without making the conversation hierarchical, or positioning these problems as issues that only affect a specific group of people.

Of course, this is all assuming that others want to talk about these issues in good faith, lol. I think plenty of people do, but I also think our broader queer politics sometimes causes people to treat these discussions with suspicion (especially on social media).

But for those of us who do want to talk about problems of language, I think that paying attention to the above can go a long way towards helping us avoid being overly individualistic and intellectually dishonest in our analyses and conclusions.

[dykeishheart]

Intellectualism is such a fraught subject because we live in a zeitgeist of anti-intellectualism being pushed from major political bodies onto constituencies via religious and economic propaganda (defunding schools, creationist leaders defrauding sciences, anti-medical conspiracy riddled through middle class and even some legislators, etc), while at the same time certain vectors of social power and legitimacy are undeniably rooted in at least the appearance of intellect. See Musk, Zuckerberg, and Gates fanboys praising their genius, the entire social movement that I like to call 'r/atheism debate me era' being beholden to talking heads they idolize like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and just the general millieu of Smart Man captivating the social media feed every few minutes with Smart quotes. Society loves an Einstein, to the point that that is a recognizable name every person on earth knows how to correlate to a specific kind of person: a smart person idolized for intelligence.

Actual education is the least accessible it's ever been in terms of the kinds that offer prestige (university) while raw knowledge and data is the most accessible it's ever been for people willing to comb through digital archives. Being too smart is to invite insult and dismissal if it's coupled with any personality flaws but it's almost universally stated that people want intelligence in a partner. The smartest people aren't given acclaim or status for being smart, but the highest wages are by and large earned by people with the most education. Legislators want less actual education happening but more educating happening, because they want more people in schools to generate revenue and fill the school-to-industry training pipeline, but they don't want those people learning the kinds of things that would teach them that pipeline exists.

There's also an incredibly annoying phenomenon where every two or three years a new pseudoscience pops up trying to explain what intelligence is and what personalities are and why we need to have more societal divisions over it, and it's been like this since The Bell Curve came out in 1994, and it's basically been eugenics every time with the license plates changed. The political benefit of being able to categorize people for division and domination dovetails perfectly with the bizarre hook that factoids have on the collective brainspace; everyone loves feeling like they know a special secret about the world, and a good many people like the feeling of that secret so much that they turn off their critical thinking for just long enough to accept any old bullshit or bigotry or conspiracy or ancient form of racism if it's packaged to look like the underside of a Snapple cap. Needless to say, you can find the absolute most esoteric, bizarre, niche, and useless info only two digital footprints away from the most baseline of common knowledge, and both will be wrong in different but equal measure, each spawned by a different abberant strain of social psychosis with a different degree of popularity determined by god drawing sticks blind out of a cup. The layers of disinformation, misinformation, lies, half remembered factoids, hallucinations, misconceptions, willful obtusenesses, deliberate obfuscations, and general fuckeries that exist within the All Encompassing Brain Soup that is the digital age could make one decide epistemology is overrated if the day of encounter was sufficiently exhausting.

And at the end of the day it largely doesn't matter. Intelligence is fake anyway. Truth is authored and knowledge unwrites it each and every minute to rewrite to the shape of power. What does it mean to be smart? God help you I don't fucking know. Will I be able to afford rent six months from now? That's a real question. Tell me when you figure that one out.

[gatheringbones]

[“Sara Ruddick, in Maternal Thinking (1989)—a groundbreaking work in feminist care ethics—frames preservative love as one of the central acts of mothering, which is the relational position from which she derives an entire epistemology of care. It’s important to note, as well, that Ruddick understands “mothering” to be a practice taken up by persons of any gender; rather, anyone who commits themselves “to responding to children’s demands, and makes the work of response a considerable part of her or his life, is a mother” (xii). Preservative love is shorthand for all of those acts that keep a being alive and intact, and it is characterized by a specific response to the vulnerability of an other. It means “to see vulnerability and to respond to it with care rather than abuse, indifference, or flight”. It doesn’t require a particular affective orientation—we don’t have to be cheerful or enthusiastic about it, and we may indeed feel deeply ambivalent about such forms of care. Ruddick: “what we are pleased to call ‘mother-love’ is intermixed with hate, sorrow, impatience, resentment, and despair”.

Of course, only some trans folks are children, and not all trans people engage in mothering. But if you’re a person of trans experience and involved in trans communities, you know that intensified forms of vulnerability and exposure to violence and debility continue to inform trans lives across age groups. In addition to this, transition also scrambles normative temporalities of development. We have “second puberties” well into adulthood; we have “big brothers” or “big sisters” mentor us through transition because, though they may be younger in years, they’ve initiated transition long before us. We sometimes come from childhood homes that did not adequately provide the forms of preservative love and nurturance that form the crux practices of mothering. Alternately, we may have these forms of motherhood reduced or withheld upon the revelation of our transness. This is all to say we remain in need of mothering (in the many-gendered, expansive sense of the word) well into adulthood.

Trans historian Morgan M Page has given us a golden rule as we navigate the spaces of social media, and it is deeply informed by the ethos of preservative love. The rule is simple. “I do not shit-talk other trans people in public. If I truly have a problem that must be addressed, I speak to them directly”. She goes on to unpack what motivates the rule: the high incidence of mental health struggle in trans communities means that call-outs and online harassment sometimes translate to self-harm and suicide. In addition to this, the rising tide of antitrans organizing has made a practice of solidarity across difference increasingly crucial. We can ill afford to be locked in self-aggrandizing battle with one another. This is doubly so when we consider that the online spaces wherein we congregate—from the Yahoo groups and chatrooms of yore to the networks we inhabit on Twitter, Instagram, and all of the closed groups on Facebook that effectively operate as both support groups and skillshares—are the only trans-majority spaces to which many of us have access.”]

hil malatino, trans care, 2020

[rlyehtaxidermist]

social media is racing towards inventing a form of Calvinism for epistemology